How Can You Handle It If You Get Banned From A Community?

You don’t know what you did and you’re being banned from the community. How do you handle it?

Reid: What happens if you get banned from a community? How should you handle that?

Cathy: This Reid Mihalko from http://www.reidaboutsex.com/.

Reid: Cathy Vartuli from http://www.theintimacydojo.com/.

Cathy: That would really be hard and it’s hard to balance that. Balance running events in the community where you want people to have a very free, you wanna people reporting if things are not going, consent is not being followed and often those people don’t want to have their names used into specific some event use when talking to someone. With the ability for the other person to go to reply and it could have been a misunderstanding, it could have been, there’s a lot of things that could have happened on taking out of context. So balancing that is a challenge.

Reid: So, this opens up to a whole raptness of interesting things to talk about.

Cathy: I mean, we often talked about raptness.

Reid: We do, we do. So, in play party community, in non-sexual community as well there’s a difference, in my opinion you should design community and community events ideally to be self-cleaning ovens. In that, you are creating rules and protocols for everybody’s benefit in creating a way for the community to get better at using these protocols and these communication skills. So that you as the organizer are not the judge and jury of every upset. And people, you can design community depending on how you wanna do it. How do you help somebody who has felt violated, who has a complaint and feel safe enough to come forward so that you know what’s going on in the community. And often times when somebody complains about somebody to keep them safe and have their privacy. And this now, you can research about social justice, rape culture dynamics and how somebody’s gotta complain or something that happened to them. How do you keep their privacy when you go to the person and say ”hey” you had these complaints and then I will like “who complains” and then we say we can’t tell you because we need to keep people’s privacy and “what they say that I did” and I’m like “I can’t tell you because if I told you, you would know who it is. So, that’s the part of the challenge. The other thing is, how do you train your community so that they could handle being banned gracefully. Which, if you can figured it out how to do that and help people feel safe, and help people feel safe in getting their own resolution on things with community support. What you have now done is you’re creating community that can handle in grown up ways doesn’t mean I don’t feel hurt or upset but they can handle their own emotions and still show up. So for me, if I’ve got banned from some events, I have a tools to be like Okay, how do I help ban myself and restore whatever justice or whatever needs to happen like tell me. Now I’m doing that because that’s the fastest way for me to get back in that community. And that’s a really high level Ninja jujitsu rather than being offended that I can’t talk to the person who accused me because I’m somehow demanding or do a certain round of due process. So you need to teach your community being handle as to leave in a way that actually strengthens the community and you can geek out and restore the justice and techniques like that. A lot of communities haven’t gotten to that place yet because everyone’s just hoping bad stuffs doesn’t happen. And when bad stuff happens, everyone’s just freakin’ out about it and so no one ever gets to next place. So that’s…

Cathy: It’s a tough balance because it is hard for people to bring stuff forward and we absolutely we want people to bring stuff’s forward. As a present time to women who complains going to bars for instance and they talked about how these guys are just assholes and hitting on them on doing all those stupid things and I’m like “have you ever told them what you object to” and they just said “no”. So there’s a cycle of guys repeating what they don’t know and they’re offending these and I’m using it as a a general examples but if we can give feedback, if we can feel safe enough so we can create a place for people can give feedback people often upgrade their behavior. But if we’re not giving that it’s really hard to do that so it’s a battle for me and it’s really challenging.

Reid: So do you do diligence? And that the community you wanted to be a part of as well. Ask them what are there braining procedures are, how they process that kind of situation. If you’re not okay with the way that they do it then you should take that into strong consideration coz you maybe the one who gets banned. And figured it that one out and sex positive community and also that usually means for the man that usually for the socially awkward man. There’s that but I’ve seen woman get banned out of the community. And I’ve seen communities do community development poorly. And there’s some communities that are doing really well and coming up with the next version 2.0 version of community. And teach your community how to get really good consent protocols, how to handle their own emotions and speak up as best as they can, how to handle if they are asked to leave and what are the restorative steps that happen after and train your community in that. It’s not always gonna go perfect because you’re dealing with human beings. And when you have communities when new people come in, they’re gonna go through their learning curve mistakes. So you gonna have that happening all the time and hopefully the “alumni” the varsity members of your community will be have more resources to help the clunky newbies get up to speed, well also vetting and discouraging truly bad or like evil bad under the surface clothe behavior.

Cathy: We love to know what you think. Where do you think you would rather draw the line in your community?